Report

Harnessing the power of the atom

This report from UK think tank the Henry Jackson Society reconsiders our nuclear energy policies, both at home and abroad.

Back in 1953, the future looked bright. At the United Nations General Assembly, President Eisenhower heralded a new era for humanity: the era of nuclear power.

The energy source would be “a great boon, for the benefit of all”, the American president said. Nuclear power was clean and revolutionary. It would not only provide copious amounts of electricity, but also lead to breakthroughs in agriculture and medicine. Eisenhower pledged that the United States would help other countries build nuclear power plants. A year later, he signed the Atomic Energy Act, which spawned the commercial nuclear power industry in the US. Private capital poured in. A uranium rush was underway.

But nuclear mania reached far beyond the Oval Office and American boardrooms. It was blowing the minds of ordinary people everywhere. At the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, 41 million visitors gazed in awe at the Atomium, a giant, glistening structure depicting an iron crystal molecule. It was a shrine to the potential of the atom. Elsewhere in the fair, visitors could tour an “electric house”, previewing how nuclear power would bring prosperity to everyone.

The wheel of history was turning. “Generations millenniums hence,” declared a science journalist, “may look back upon these years when atomic energy was first put to work in the same spirit in which we now think of the… occasion when man first learned the use of fire.” Fast forward to 2025, and the prophecy has not come true. Nuclear power supplies barely 9% of the world’s electricity. By comparison, coal provides 36% and natural gas 22%, according to Our World in Data, a data laboratory based at Oxford University. Even hydropower beats nuclear with 14%.

So what went wrong? Why did nuclear power so badly misfire?

The prevailing narrative is that, after a boom in the 1950s and 1960s, nuclear power was phased out because it is lethal. Headline-grabbing accidents – at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979, at Chernobyl in 1986 and at Fukushima in 2011 – proved how hazardous nuclear power really is. As a result, America and Britain gave up on nuclear power. 10 Germany and Japan closed their nuclear plants, while Italy banned them altogether.

But that was a grave mistake. Nuclear power is safe. In fact, it is safer not only than oil and coal, but also gas, hydropower and wind. And that is including all the nuclear accidents. Despite what many people think, there have been very few deaths linked to nuclear. Estimates put the number at fewer than 100, including both direct and indirect deaths. By contrast, the death toll from oil and gas pipeline accidents surpasses 4,000.

It was not the accidents themselves that put nuclear power on the ropes, but how they were perceived in the public mind. As historian Niall Ferguson has said: “A catastrophe lays bare the societies and states that it strikes. It is a moment of truth, of revelation.” What Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima revealed is that we love to worry about nuclear power. Popular culture has milked this fear for entertainment.

But climate change has rewritten the script. To reach net zero and avert ecological meltdown, we need nuclear power. The reason: renewables alone cannot produce enough energy to meet the world’s needs. But nuclear power can.

Governments worldwide are rushing to build cutting-edge plants. Big banks have pledged to finance the three-fold expansion of nuclear power by 2050. Big Tech behemoths, from Amazon to Microsoft, plan to use it to power Artificial Intelligence (AI) data operations.

It is time, therefore, to reconsider our nuclear energy policies, both at home and abroad. This report does just that.